After Effects CC 2015 New Features

Author

Updated

7/29/2016

Released

6/16/2015

Adobe After Effects CC 2015 brings significant breakthroughs in performance and shared workflows—and in this course, master user Chris Meyer will show you how to put them to work in real-world situations. After Effects has been rewired underneath the hood to be more responsive, including a new preview scheme optimized for those with an editing background. Creative Cloud Libraries were also introduced in the CC 2015 release, as well as face tracking technology thanks to Adobe Character Animator, which is now bundled with the program. With over 20 years experience using After Effects, Chris Meyer demonstrates these and other changes using real-world examples, including how to work around the inevitable shortcomings and gotchas.

Check back often for updates. New chapters will be added each time Adobe releases a major After Effects update.

Topics include:

Preview options

Editing a project without stopping preview playback

Navigating the CC Libraries workflows

Moving animations from Adobe Character Animator to After Effects

Using expressions to dynamically measure facial dimensions

Setting up layers in CINEWARE and CINEMA 4D Lite

Skill Level Appropriate for all

2h 17m

Duration

73,262

Views

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- Hi, I'm Chris Meyer of Crish Design,and welcome to Adobe After EffectsCreative Cloud 2015 Updates.Now, there's two main themes to this update.One is performance, and the other is workflow.On the performance end of things,Adobe has been re-writing how After Effects worksunderneath the hood.In short, it's now separated the user interfaceprocessing thread from the rendering processor thread.Now, if you've ever had a case with After Effectswhere you were dragging a slider or changing a parameterand the whole user interface froze until that framere-rendered, well, that's the main thing that they're fixingby separating these two threads.

You can make edits in After Effects, and not be slowed downor stopped while rendering is happening as fast as it canin the background.A big advantage of this particular schemeis something called Uninterrupted Previews.This means you can now work on a composition,including adding layers and editing effects and such,while preview continues to loop.It's a much more fluid way of working.Additionally, the whole preview scheme has been re-worked.There's a brand new preview panelwith a lot of new options and new preview behaviors.

For example, the space bar now works a lot morelike a nonlinear editing system does.On the workflow side, we're seeing the first implementationof creative cloud libraries in After Effects.Now, if you've already seen libraries in, say,Photoshop or Illustrator, you have a feelingfor what they're all about.But if you haven't, it's a panel inside After Effectswhere you or other users can put assets,such as PSD files, vector artwork, color swatches,look files, et cetera, to share between applications,share between users, and to pull in and usein your After Effects project.

Now, since this is a version 1.0 implementationin After Effects CC 2015, there is some asterisks,limitations, and gotchas.The biggest one is that you cannot bring an assetfrom After Effects into your Libraries panel.Right now, it's one-way traffic,where you pull out of Libraries and add themto your After Effects project.There's also other gotchas with how you handlePhotoshop files with alpha channels,vector artwork that you've downloaded fromthe Creative Cloud market, and also new workflowfor working with color swatches.

Now, those are the main items introducedin the first version of After Effects CC 2015,also known as Version 13.5.A big thing about 13.5 is that it uses the same file formatas CC 2014, which was versions 13.0, one, and two.That means when you download CC 2015 from Creative Cloud,it will not overwrite CC 2014.You will have both versions side by side on your computer,and you can use one version for a while, save the project,and open it in the other version if you want.

That might come in particularly handy ifthere's some things in this new version of After Effectsthat you don't like or that you miss, for example,multi-processor rendering has been disabled in this version,you don't have to worry about choosing up frontwhat version you use.You can move fluidly between 2014 and 2015.There's been some other changes in this release as well,including some user interface changes,some improvements to the way expressions are handled,and also some minor changes in the Cineware plugin.The new version of After Effects also installsa perview of Adobe Character Animator,and integrates its face-tracking technologydirectly in the comp panel.

As Adobe releases new updates to After Effects,we'll be adding more movies onto this coursereflecting those changes.Therefore, don't worry so much about what project fileor what composition I'm using in a particular movie.This is all about showing you what the new features are,teaching you the workflow so you canget the most out of them, hit the ground running,or decide if maybe you want tocontinue using the old version.It's up to you, but I want you to knowhow to take advantage of some of these cool new features.